Transcript: Reporter Seth Harp’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

I mean, that’s the level of secrecy, and that’s how elite Delta Force is as a military.

Understanding Delta Force

TUCKER CARLSON: What is Delta Force?

SETH HARP: Delta Force is what’s called a Special Mission unit. It is an army unit. It’s part of what’s called the Joint Special Operations Command. It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue.

For many years, they were obsessed with the problem or the danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon. This is all pre-9/11.

After 2001, after the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in US Military operations. And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, or what we might call black operations. That’s Delta Force, and it’s headquartered at Fort Bragg.

TUCKER CARLSON: They get no publicity.

SETH HARP: None. I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the US had been at war since 2001. And I found that, in fact, they were talked about in the context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.

The Culture of Secrecy

TUCKER CARLSON: So there are other units, famously, that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers a lot, whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one. And, you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, etc. But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that?

SETH HARP: There are former Delta Force officers who I’ve seen occasionally talk on TV. But as far as the regular enlisted guys go, their culture really is… You know, the saying that they have that I’ve heard repeated is that, you know, “SEALs write books, Delta guys write history,” something to that effect. It’s very much part of their culture not to come on TV shows and not to talk and not to write books.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. Thereby increasing the mystique. And I think the assumption that we all have is that because they’re the most secretive, they are the most impressive.

SETH HARP: They’re very impressive in certain ways. The level of physical fitness that you have to have to be selected to be an operator is very, very impressive. Marksmanship, you know, other skills that they have. Very tough, tough people, for the most part. But I, as I talk about extensively in the book, the unit has, I think, declined in recent years in terms of its culture.

The Murder Mystery at the Heart of Fort Bragg

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s begin with the story of the Delta operator, Billy Levine, and the man with whom he was found dead. Who killed them and why?

SETH HARP: That’s the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end. I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy, really, it’s a murder mystery. This book is at its heart. And the question is, who killed those two guys? And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects. And that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration.

It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered, had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville. In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leshikar, right in front of his… Mark Leshikar’s daughter, who was about 6 years old at the time.

And the police, the local police, the sheriff’s department, the district Attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the US Army Criminal Investigation Investigations Division completely covered up that murder, and I use that word “covered up” advisedly. I’m actually an attorney myself, so I don’t use it lightly.

But I devote the first two chapters of the book to showing what the evidence was against Levine and how that case was adjudicated and how he was not even placed under arrest. He was just lightly questioned and let go that same night on the grounds that it had been supposedly a justifiable homicide, when in fact that theory, that defense was definitively contradicted by the physical evidence.

So Levine, having previously killed a guy, then goes on to commit three, or excuse me, I think four or five felony offenses in Fayetteville over the next 18 months, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville, manufacturing controlled substance for cooking crack in his house. Lots of weapons charges. He’d even been arrested for harboring an escapee, which is a new one to me. And in every case, the DA had dropped the charges against him.

The Profile of Billy Levine

TUCKER CARLSON: Who was Billy Levine?

SETH HARP: He was a Delta Force soldier. He had done about… He had done more than 12 deployments, more than a dozen deployments in his career. He wasn’t a high level officer in Delta Force, but he was a veteran operator who had been, who had deep experience in America’s classified assassination programs in Iraq and Syria and in Afghanistan. So that was the reason why I think he was not… he was dealt with with such leniency by the authorities.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did he shoot his best friend to death?

SETH HARP: It’s very mysterious why he did that. Both of them had severe drug problems. You know, this is one thing I… Levine was not a one dimensional character by any means. He’s someone whose military career and whose downward trajectory I reconstruct in the book because I think it’s so illustrative of what’s happened to our military over the past 20 years. He was such a great example of what has happened.

He developed very severe PTSD, moral injury. He came to believe that the wars in which he was participating were morally wrong. He had severe substance abuse issues, very severe. He was smoking crack every day and doing a lot of other drugs as well.

Drug Use Among Elite Operators

TUCKER CARLSON: While he was a Delta operator or smoking crack every day?

SETH HARP: Yes. And I learned that that’s not that unusual. To my surprise.

TUCKER CARLSON: My understanding was in your description suggests that these guys are like basically Olympic athletes whose physical condition is going to be monitored, I assume by the unit doctor or somebody.

SETH HARP: Well, you know, operators have a particular type of physical fitness that you really only find in the army, which is the kind of guy who can, you know, run a two mile run in 12 minutes, but also smoke a pack a day, you know, and get drunk five times a week. Yeah, I mean they’re very, very savages. This is just savages. Yeah. So that’s impressive.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that, but this guy was maintaining his, you know, his training schedule while smoking crack every day.

SETH HARP: Yes. And I was shocked to the degree to which because not only, you know, I served in the conventional part of the military, not in the Special Forces and I had also been out for more than ten years.

So I was very, very surprised when I started investigating Fort Bragg and learning the extent to which cocaine use has normalized in the Green Berets, not just in Delta Force, but in all of the army Special Forces, which is a much larger organization and Delta Force is pretty small. But the Green Berets is thousands of troops and people just, you know, people that live in this community, live in Fayetteville or live in Moore county, you know, to them that’s just understood that this is just part of the lifestyle.

The Victim: Mark Leshikar

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is the man he shot? His best friend, Mark Leshikar.

SETH HARP: He was a Green beret in the 19th Special Forces Group currently serving when he died.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was.

SETH HARP: So the 19th Special Forces Group is actually a National Guard unit. So he was a Green Beret. He was still serving in the National Guard. I don’t believe he was on active duty the day he died.

TUCKER CARLSON: Huh.

SETH HARP: I’m not sure if it makes much of a difference, but to be precise.

The Cover-Up and Lack of Accountability

TUCKER CARLSON: Was Levine ever punished for killing him?

SETH HARP: No, he wasn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: In any way?

SETH HARP: Not in any way. He remained an active duty operator on Delta Force after killing a guy in his house when they were both completely out of their minds on drugs. And Levine was not even given a toxicology test after he shot somebody completely crazy.

The reason for that is because once you have done 10 deployments in service of covert operations, assassination operations, it is an unacceptable national security outcome from the perspective of authorities for you to go to prison, for you to be in a courtroom for any reason. Those guys, they are not supposed to exist, and they just can’t process them through the criminal justice system in ordinary ways.

And to me, that’s what made his death so intriguing, because so many people alleged… the sources that I quote. I want to be responsible about this and not say that it’s what I believe, but the sort of conventional wisdom that when I first got into the case, people were saying that the military itself had killed Billy Levine because he had turned into such a problem and was messing up so badly.

America’s Assassination Programs

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t want to derail your story, but you’ve referred twice to assassination programs. I wasn’t aware that the United States admits it assassinates people. When did that start? When did that become a feature of modern war or statecraft or whatever it is? What is that? What are you talking about?

The Secret Orders and Assassination Policy

In 2001, President George W. Bush signed secret orders that essentially reversed the assassination ban that had been put in place decades earlier. Actually, the groundwork for that legal move had been laid under President Reagan. There were memos in place, or certain authorities, executive orders in place that did allow for assassination in the case when the target was deemed to be a terrorist.

Those authorities actually weren’t used for decades. But after the September 11 attacks, Bush reversed that. You’re saying that you haven’t heard too much about it, but that’s because we often hear about it by a certain euphemism, which is “night raids.”

So you may have heard that under President Obama, the war making and war effort in Afghanistan became about drone strikes and night raids. Well, night raids is just a euphemism for assassinations. If somebody comes out waving a white flag, well, he’ll probably get shot anyway. But under certain circumstances they will take people prisoner. But for the most part, when they hit a target, every military age man on that target gets killed, whether or not he’s guilty of a crime or even suspected of a crime.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not he’s guilty of a crime or even suspected of a crime.

SETH HARP: Well, guilty of a crime. I mean it all depends upon the determinations of intelligence analysts in the Joint Special Operations Command and in the CIA and what have you. The people that generate targets. Delta Force just hits the targets. They may not necessarily generate them, although they do have substantial intelligence assets that develop targets.

But there’s no way to check their work and say who these people really were. As I talk about extensively in the book and trying to get some clarity around this, the error rate is believed to be very high, at least 50%.

Historical Context of American Assassination Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: Is this a long standing feature of American military policy? Have we been assassinating people for centuries? Is this an American thing to do?

SETH HARP: Absolutely not. And in fact, before the modern era, before the 21st century, assassination was not considered to be a valid or creditworthy tool of war making. It was considered to be something dirty down low. There also wasn’t perceived to be a tactical advantage necessarily in assassinating enemy commanders in the enemy chain of command. There was more of a sense in fighting things out honestly on the battlefield. That has completely changed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Influence on America up until 9/11 you’re saying. So when you say modern era, you don’t mean like the advent of electricity, you mean like 25 years ago.

SETH HARP: So I’m not a military historian by any means, but my understanding is that there was extensive assassination operations also in Vietnam. We call that the Phoenix program where the CIA was using assassination to dismantle what was perceived as enemy command and control networks.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was it pretty effective? We won that war.

SETH HARP: Actually I think that a lot of people in the sort of national security set did, although it elicited a great deal of repugnance in the public. My sense is that it was perceived as an effective way of waging war.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, then why didn’t we win?

SETH HARP: Well, we haven’t won any wars since 1945, unless you count the Gulf War. So I don’t think we’re doing anything right. Basically. Including assassinations.

America’s Military Decline

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, that is a stat that’s kind of hard to argue with, that you almost never hear in and around Washington. Like, when was the last time you won a war? Baffling. You spend a trillion dollars a year, and you can’t win a freaking war. You can’t beat the Houthis. Like, maybe it’s time for some reform or to rethink what we’re doing. It’s not working, even by their own measurement.

SETH HARP: Sure. I completely agree. And I think a lot of people, including people who are anti-war and who would prefer to see a more isolationist foreign policy, complacently assume that because we spend ungodly amounts of money on our military, a trillion dollars this year on the national defense budget, that whatever else you think of our foreign policy, at least we have the world’s most powerful military. That assumption goes largely unexamined. And the reality is, we don’t.

I was just at Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C. A magazine sent me to cover that. And a lot of those troops were from Fort Bragg. You may have seen on TV what a joke the parade turned out to be, how disorganized, how unimpressive it was, and the technology that was on display.

People expect it to be this fascistic spectacle, this authoritarian spectacle like you might see in North Korea or whatever. But I was looking at the troops going by, not even marching in step. The Bradley fighting vehicles, which are 40 years old and perform very poorly, haven’t been replaced with anything newer. Same goes for the Abrams tank. It’s been in service for more than 40 years. The Blackhawk helicopter. Just before the parade, a Blackhawk helicopter had crashed into a passenger plane over the Potomac River. Killed 68 people. Worst aviation disaster since 2001.

I’m looking at all of this, and I’m thinking, man, our army is in sorry shape. And that was the 250th anniversary of the US army, because the army actually predates the Constitution and predates the creation of our nation. To me, it is very worrisome to see the state of decline and disrepair in which it’s currently languishing. And I think the stuff that’s going on in Fort Bragg is highly symptomatic of just that.

The Role of Delta Force in Assassinations

TUCKER CARLSON: Certainly is. So back to assassinations. So assassinations are, it sounds by your description, like a big part of our foreign policy or our war making efforts.

SETH HARP: A central part of it. Sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Delta is basically conducting a lot of these. Some of these, absolutely.

SETH HARP: Delta Force and then Seal Team 6, which is Delta’s naval counterpart, also part of the Joint Special Operations Command. And you hear a lot more about them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, can I ask a dumb question? Why? So if you’re fighting a war or you’re in some protracted struggle with violence, I don’t know if it’s a war, but you’re like fighting, why wouldn’t, if you could, why wouldn’t you capture key players from the other side in order to extract usable intelligence from them? I thought that’s what we used to do.

SETH HARP: I don’t want to paint them in a cartoonish light. By them, I mean, Delta and JSOC.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re not making these decisions. I mean, these are made, as you said, by the command structure.

SETH HARP: Often it’s the direct orders in the White House. And with also with input from certain congressional leaders are involved in these targeting decisions to a degree that I was not aware. Congressional leaders, apparently I’ve heard anecdotes about operators sitting on target and waiting for the go ahead from Congress. I’m not sure what to make of that because all this is so classified, but that’s what I’ve heard.

TUCKER CARLSON: Classified? I’m sorry, why would it be classified?

SETH HARP: Well, that’s another big component of the evolution of the American way of making war, waging war for the past 20 years is the increasing secrecy around all of this, which I think also has had an extremely deleterious effect.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not able to complete a sentence without me interrupting you. I’m so sorry.

SETH HARP: No, it’s great.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’re just saying so many things that are evocative and interesting. I just, I’m trying to track them all down. Okay, I will stop interrupting you. So you said, I don’t want to paint a clownish picture of the Delta.

SETH HARP: Operators, but they do capture people. They will abduct people they will take them to like a ship that’s in international waters and do God knows what to them to get information. But in most cases, they’re just killing the person that they’re targeting.

The Blowback Effect

TUCKER CARLSON: What kind of people are these? Like villagers in far away Middle Eastern countries or others?

SETH HARP: It all depends on the theater. It depends upon the time. I can tell you what they’re doing right now because Trump made an interesting comment in one of his speeches earlier this year where he talked about. He said something to the effect of “since my inauguration.” It had been a few months since he was inaugurated. He said, “since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria and Somalia.”

TUCKER CARLSON: This is all going to come home. We’re going to have this kind of violence here. You can’t commit violence without facing the effects of violence. It’s just a principle of the universe. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That never changes. And if we’re running around assassinating people, we will have Americans assassinated. Fact.

SETH HARP: Well, some of that blowback, I fully agree. Some of that blowback can be seen in cases like Billy Levine where he’s someone who has, since he was a very young man, has been raised in this system of violence who comes back and is unable to control it.

When he perceives small threats, like with his buddy Mark Leshikar at his house, barging his front door because they’re both out of their head on drugs, he just as a reflexive mechanism, pulls out his gun and shoots the other guy. So I think one of the first signs of this. And I’m tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers since 2020. In which it was either the Fort Bragg soldier who was murdered, accused of murder, or convicted of murder. 24, that’s my best count. It might be off by one or two on the margins.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s wild. Military base.

SETH HARP: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would imagine the murder rate at a military base would be zero.

SETH HARP: I think it should be. If you’re an employee of the government, if you’re an active duty soldier, you’re.

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the most disciplined people in the world, right?

SETH HARP: Supposed to be. I don’t know if you can say that anymore.

Billy Levine’s Background

TUCKER CARLSON: So Billy Levine was, by the way, was he from a service family? How did he wind up in all this?

SETH HARP: No, he wasn’t. He was a middle class guy from working class guy from the upper peninsula of Michigan who joined the army when he was 17 years old before 9/11 happened. And 9/11 took place while he was still in training. And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the 1st Special Forces Group. And then from there by 2009 he was a relatively young man, 26 I think, when he was selected for Delta Force.

TUCKER CARLSON: So he was an extraordinary person in that he was clearly suited to the job.

SETH HARP: Well, very physically fit, very outdoorsy, very tough. A guy who had the self confidence that is necessary for this type of work. An adrenaline junkie for sure. A lot of these guys are big time adrenaline junkies jumping out of planes. Parachuting is a big part of what they do. So he was like those guys in all these respects.

But at its core, Billy Levine was somebody who also had a sense of ethics and right and wrong that his time in the service really degraded to tragic effect.

The Double Murder Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: So he murders his best friend in front of the daughter, gets away with it, no penalty whatsoever. That is absolutely wild. And then some months later, he himself is found dead with another man on a remote training range at Bragg.

SETH HARP: Right. About 18 months later.

TUCKER CARLSON: Eighteen months later, what, were they shot to death?

SETH HARP: Yes, and it appears that double murder appears to have been the work of people who knew what they were doing. There were no, well, you’ve got about—

TUCKER CARLSON: 50,000 potential suspects on the scene because—

SETH HARP: It’s a military base, right. And the other guy, his name was Timothy Dumas. Not to reduce them to their respective races, but to keep it clear. One was a white guy, one was a black guy. Levine’s a white guy, Dumas is a black guy.

He also was not someone who would have been easy to kill. He wasn’t an operator. He was a supply officer who was attached to JSOC. He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the JSOC-led task force in Afghanistan. So he’s a guy who gets the operators all the stuff that they need in the field, including cash, weapons, ammunition, food, all the basics. Gas.

And he was deeply—he’s a whole separate story that we could go into. But to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself, you know, both of them were very, very tough guys who never went anywhere unarmed, who kept their heads on a swivel, and who had been to war repeatedly.

So the fact that both of them were cleanly taken out and then dumped in this remote area and that the scene was free of any kind of—you know, I interviewed several army CID agents who worked the scene of the murder, and by all accounts, they found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings. But, you know, there weren’t even footprints on the ground.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shot with a rifle?

SETH HARP: No. I was never able to obtain ballistic evidence. I believe that Dumas, the black guy, was shot in the head with a small caliber pistol. And I don’t know what type of weapon caused Levine’s injuries, but he was shot multiple times in the torso and in the leg, maybe five times. I’m not quite sure.

The Crime Scene Details

TUCKER CARLSON: Any idea where they were killed?

SETH HARP: Dumas was killed on site. It seems he was killed execution style on site. Levine’s body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck. And then someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back.

And so the army—there’s lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that somebody had the third man because there had to have been a third person there. These guys couldn’t have shot each other because there were no guns. So someone left with the guns at a minimum.

And so Army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad—a bad guy, to be honest. He was a drug trafficker, and by some accounts a hitman.

TUCKER CARLSON: You said he was an army officer.

SETH HARP: He was a warrant officer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Warrant officer.

SETH HARP: Yeah. But, yeah, I talked to a woman, a police officer, in fact, who Dumas had offered to kill her husband for money. And so CID presumed he was active duty. He was not active duty at the time of his death. He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior.

And that is actually a key fact that we can get into, because the fact that he had been kicked out when he was a few months shy of his 19th year in service or a few months shy of his 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension. If you serve 20 years in the military, you get a pension. So the fact that he had been kicked out and deprived of his pension really is an operative fact in all of this, because the story goes on from here.

But what was I saying about the murder itself?

TUCKER CARLSON: So he was killed. Dumas was killed on site.

SETH HARP: Right. So the—I was trying to recapitulate CID’s theory of the case very briefly, which is that they think that Dumas was hired to kill Levine and did kill Levine with the cooperation of another person or persons. They then put Levine’s body in the back of the truck, drive him out in the woods with the intention of throwing his body in a lake that’s near there.

But the truck got stuck in the woods, got stuck in the mud, because it wasn’t on a road, it was on a firebreak trail. And at that point, according to CID’s theory of the case, the other guy decided to just abandon the situation and decided to kill Dumas in order to get rid of any witnesses.

Motives for Murder

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the theory as to why Dumas would have been hired to kill Levine?

SETH HARP: Why he would have been hired?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SETH HARP: So there’s a lot of competing possibilities. And as I said, I think that’s what makes this murder mystery, for me, at least as a writer, it was a productive narrative vehicle because there’s lots of things to explore.

One is that Mark Leshikar, the Green Beret, who he killed, you know, his teammates, by some accounts, wanted revenge. The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers. I mean, you know, you can’t just kill somebody, maybe get off legally, but there’s going to be repercussions.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. A lot of dangerous people around.

SETH HARP: Sure. Yeah. So that’s one.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so that’s a—that’s a more human. I’m not saying justifiable. I’m not as bothered by Leshikar’s buddies getting together and killing the guy who killed him. That seems understandable.

SETH HARP: I will say I found no evidence for that. I also learned that Dumas and Levine were trafficking cocaine together at a high level. And that trafficking cocaine, not dealing cocaine, you know, in little baggies to their friends. I’m talking about trafficking kilos of cocaine from Mexico up into the United States and distributing it in a large multi—

TUCKER CARLSON: And Levine is a just once again, an active duty—

SETH HARP: That’s correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Member of Delta Force.

SETH HARP: That’s correct, yes. So they had enemies in the drug world. Dangerous enemies. People that will kill you if you don’t pay for your product.

And finally, Levine, as I said before, was known to be going around telling people that he didn’t believe in the mission anymore, that what the United States was doing was wrong, and was in the process of writing a book. And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books.

TUCKER CARLSON: But, you know, possibly really frowns on it.

The Tell-All Documents

SETH HARP: Levine’s ex-wife told me that he was writing a book. She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, “I’m writing a book.” And he also said that someone already wanted to turn into a movie.

Now, Dumas—so put a pin in that. Dumas, because he had been kicked out of the army just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something variously described to me as a book or a letter in which it wasn’t a memoir. He was—it was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document.

He told people that he knew about a drug trafficking ring in the Special Forces involving Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side in Afghanistan where there was a great deal of drug trafficking going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, by active duty U.S. military?

SETH HARP: By the Afghan client state that the U.S. supported for 20 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SETH HARP: So all these guys, having served many times in Afghanistan, would have been very close and in close proximity to working with warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, and so on. Afghans who were some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, period. So that context, I think, is important.

But in any event, Dumas had written this letter purporting to name all these individual members of this drug trafficking ring and the Special Forces and was going around telling people that because of this leverage that he had over the Special Forces Command, he was going to get them to reinstate his pension.

So the fact that both of these guys are writing tell-all documents and then both turn up murdered on Fort Bragg is yet another potential theory for explaining their deaths.

Theories Among Military Personnel

TUCKER CARLSON: You must have spoken to people they knew, their friends. What is the prevailing theory among people who are there?

SETH HARP: I can’t say that anybody purports to know for sure, but I would say the most common reflexive answer that you get from folks is that they think that they were murdered by elements of Delta Force, either rogue elements of the unit or the command itself. Now, I want to be very careful—

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on.

SETH HARP: I want to be very careful and say that I don’t have any evidence of that, and I don’t pretend to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that the opinion of any Delta operators?

SETH HARP: Do you know, funnily enough, yeah, one of the guys I talked to, a former Delta operator, seemed to find that—excuse me, a former Delta officer, seem to find that perfectly plausible, which was disturbing to me, but it’s bonkers. Again, it’s not—folks who read the book, they will see the direction in which I lean. Ultimately, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but bottom line, no—

TUCKER CARLSON: Arrests have been made.

The Surprising Arrest

SETH HARP: That’s not true. So in—and a further complication comes in with regard to just that. So recently, I don’t want to spoil the last chapter of the book, but recently the Department of Justice accused someone of committing these murders.

And let me just say that it is not at all who you would think, and virtually all—or I can just say all of the sources that I talk to about this either dismiss it out of hand and say there’s no way, or they just have a really hard time believing it. And the person they’ve accused has pleaded not guilty and he is scheduled to go on trial in January 2026.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you spoken to him?

SETH HARP: I have not spoken to his father, but not him.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a Delta operator.

SETH HARP: He’s not. Yeah. He’s someone who, people struggle to understand how he could have, how anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where he lived, which was not in the area, go onto Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are—one of them is a real life Jason Bourne and the other one, also a very dangerous man. How he could have done that and gotten away with it.

And also the indictment is very strange. You know, the victims are identified only by their initials. A lot of the case is under seal. The whole thing is very suspicious. I don’t want to dance around it. A lot of people that I’ve talked to say the government is framing this kid because he was 20 years old at the time. 20. And Levine’s 37, Dumas is 44.

You know, these are mature men who, the idea that a 20-year-old stick-up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people’s opinion. Now personally, I have to think that the Department of Justice doesn’t indict people for murder lightly.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope not.

The Investigation Continues

SETH HARP: I just have trouble getting that far mentally. So it seems like he must have had some involvement. I want to credit my government for being at least that minimum level of responsibility that they’re not simply framing this kid. But they haven’t made any of their evidence public. And as I said, he’s pleaded not guilty. So we’ll just have to see how that trial goes.

TUCKER CARLSON: But they made the indictment public, but none of the evidence.

SETH HARP: The indictment is public. But you know, like I said, it identifies. I only knew about it because I think someone sent it to me. It only identifies the victims by their initials, WL and TD. I’ve never seen that before. A murder indictment where the victims are identified by their initials.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t even, especially since their murder was public. I mean it was reported on at the time. Right.

SETH HARP: It is a very, very strange case.

Command’s Knowledge of Levine’s Activities

TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s what we know. We know that Levine murdered a guy, got away with it. Obviously his superior officers knew that. Command knew that. Was it widely known that he was a drug trafficker?

SETH HARP: It was widely known that he was a drug user. And, yes, it was known that he was the guy that dealt drugs to his fellow operators. I mean, I talked to Mark Leshikar’s family. So Mark and Billy, they were best friends. And so Mark’s wife and his mom, even, they all knew Billy Levine. They had all spent time at his house.

And many other witnesses. You know, I interviewed lots of family members and friends of both of these men. They said that, you know, you would go into Billy’s house, and there was just cocaine everywhere. And all his fellow operators from Delta Force were at his house, too. There’s a bunch of coke on the table. They’re doing MDMA. They’re even smoking heroin.

And it’s considered to be totally normal in this community. That’s what, to me, was the most shocking to hear again and again. Like, not only to be told that all these people, these guys are using drugs, but that people just seem to think that that’s kind of what they do, which I didn’t know that.

Pentagon’s Failure to Act

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s so many threats. I mean, the most obvious is the human effect of 12 combat deployments. So that’s too much, obviously, and that will destroy you. It sounds like it destroyed Billy Levine. The second is like, where’s the Pentagon in this? This is the premier unit in the United States military, and people are openly using cocaine and smoking crack and shooting their friends, and no one’s doing anything about it. Like, what is that?

SETH HARP: It’s baffling to me. I would have never imagined. I mean, I remember when I was in the army, one guy, a sergeant in my company, tested positive for cocaine in a piss test, and he was just gone after that. I mean, he was just removed from the unit.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s a question that I should have asked you a half an hour ago. What about drug testing?

The Drug Testing Charade

SETH HARP: So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing, but apparently they consider it a joke. I mean, there’s a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs. A lot of Navy SEALs have gone on the record to say that, you know, they were using constantly during their time in service and that the drug testing regimen was a complete joke because there’s ways to defeat it.

In particular, you can get a tip off when you. And because it’s supposed to be random, it’s not something they do regularly, and maybe that’s what they need to be doing. But as the randomized testing, you know, you can be told by someone in time, “Hey, your name is on the list.” And that gives you time to, like, suck down a bunch of water and stop doing drugs and pass the test.

TUCKER CARLSON: Or buy urine. Buy clean urine.

SETH HARP: But you would imagine maybe that’s something that’s going on as well. Hadn’t heard that in particular, but I know that people can do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: They certainly can.

Elite Operators Above the Law

SETH HARP: You got to remember, these guys are intelligent, highly trained. They’re spies just as much as they are assassins. Many of them are. There’s various levels within Delta Force. There’s compartmented elements, there’s the line squadrons, et cetera. So it depends on the person.

But, you know, these are people who are. Their job is to do covert action. So they’re very good at getting away with things. When your job is to penetrate a foreign country that’s guarded by paranoid counterintelligence officials, to go into that country and, I don’t know, bug an embassy or kidnap a guy off the street, a drug test isn’t going to be something that you’re too worried about.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think, and you alluded to this earlier, there comes a point where, you know, the government is afraid of you because you know too much, you’ve done too much. You’re also performing what they think is a valuable service. No one else can provide that service. Like you’re too valuable to expel over a failed piss test.

SETH HARP: That’s a great point. That’s absolutely part of it, which is that, yeah, after they’ve spent millions of dollars training you, they don’t really care. I think they would put it as like, if they were to come out and say it, it’s like “big boy rules,” I think, is how they look at it. If you’re going to do drugs, then do it. Just don’t get caught.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

SETH HARP: Just don’t get caught is the rule.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it sounds like their work life has the same rule.

SETH HARP: Absolutely. Yeah.

Combat Veterans and Anti-War Sentiment

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said Billy Levine had decided that the missions he’d been sent on 12 times were not morally justifiable. The whole war on terror was a bad idea. Is that a common view, do you think?

SETH HARP: You know, it is. The fact that combat veterans are one of the most reliable anti-war demographics in our country.

TUCKER CARLSON: They don’t know that in cable news. They’re always like, “Oh, combat veterans support whatever mission this is.” That’s the opposite of what I’ve noticed.

SETH HARP: The opposite is true. There’s data on this, there’s polling. Super majorities of combat veterans say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and I’m one of them. And so, to me to learn that Billy Levine, you know, held those views is not surprising at all.

Seth Harp’s Personal Journey

TUCKER CARLSON: When did that come to you, by the way? What’s your can tell us? Take five minutes and tell us your story, if that’s all right.

SETH HARP: Sure. You know, I’m not. My story is really not part of the book. But the relevant background would be that I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine’s first tour in Iraq. And, you know, before that deployment was over, I had come to the firm point of view that the war was not just a mistake, but a crime to carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there weren’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what was your role? You were in the Army?

SETH HARP: Yeah, you know, I was in college. I was a college student who joined the Army Reserves. I was a student at the University of Texas in order to pay for college.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, wow.

SETH HARP: I fell for the recruiter’s pitch, which is, you know, “one weekend a month, two weeks a year.” I was 19 years old, and that was in 2003.

The Reserves Deception

TUCKER CARLSON: That used to be real. Well, that was the year we invaded Iraq. Yeah, that used to be real. I mean, the Reserves served, you know, one weekend a month, two weeks a year for a long, long time. And then the war on terror commenced, and those guys were dragged into real war. But I don’t think that had happened before, had it? Well, you would know. You did it.

SETH HARP: No, it hadn’t happened before. And in fact, you know, I sometimes, in retrospect, struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I opposed the Iraq war and had no interest in fighting in the Iraq war and yet still joined the Army Reserve at a time when it was clear that the Iraq war was going to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because the Reserves were not used in that way.

SETH HARP: There’s that. And also, even people who opposed the war had no idea that it was going to last for years. We forget about this completely. But even people who opposed the war assumed that it would be over pretty quickly.

And I can remember even asking my recruiter naively, “Are you sure I’m not going to get sent to this war Iraq that everyone’s talking about?” “Don’t worry about that.” But yeah, of course, my deployment orders were cut even before I left basic training. They were sent to me while I was standing in formation in basic training. It said to deploy to Iraq for 528 days.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on. And you’re a UT student?

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry to laugh.

SETH HARP: It’s okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hilarious.

SETH HARP: It was two years before I went back to college. After the day I signed that contract.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did your girlfriend or parents or buddies say? Sorry, I’m sorry. It’s like, do you see the humor kind of the.

SETH HARP: I do, of course, yeah. My parents were pretty resigned to it, bless their hearts. They had to put up with a lot. But, you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the Daily Texan because I wrote for my student newspaper, you know, talking about the Iraq war and using my perspective as a veteran to try to convince people that this was a mistake and that this whole post-9/11 permanent war paradigm should be re-examined. So that’s kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to wait.

528 Days in Iraq

TUCKER CARLSON: So how long did you spend in Iraq?

SETH HARP: 528 days.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, you actually did?

SETH HARP: Oh, yeah, yeah. Every single one of those days.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was that like?

SETH HARP: You know, I think a lot of people had certainly had rougher deployments than I did. I’ve read books about some of the units that had the toughest, that had the most casualties. I don’t want to, you know, exaggerate what my experience was like, but at the same time it was pretty rough.

I mean, there were guys in my unit who were killed. We were attacked on a fairly regular basis. Nothing crazy, but you know, getting shot at and getting mortared was a continuous thing. We were often outside the wire because we were, although we were non-combat troops, we built bridges and roads was our job. We did a lot of construction work and dirt work in war zones or in, you know, areas where there had been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by IEDs.

So several of our convoys were ambushed. A lot of, I think maybe five or six guys were shot and survived. And then also there were other bad things that went on. You know, in one circumstance there was a soldier who shot up a car in front of me and another group of soldiers and killed the occupants of that car, who were just a woman and her kid.

And you know, he said that he thought that, you know, they were approaching too fast. I don’t want to get into all the details of it, but the ugliness of it and the savagery and how unnecessary it all was made a deep, deep impression on me at that age. And I have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to opposing you know, the continuation of these wars.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, bless you for that. What was it like coming back after 528 days? Did you rejoin your fraternity or what? I mean, it must have been.

The Psychological Impact of War

SETH HARP: It was great coming back. It was good. I didn’t have the stereotypical Hurt Locker type of experience where I wasn’t like, what’s that movie, Apocalypse Now? Or I’m laying under the ceiling fan, skinny rats. It wasn’t like that.

I do remember having nightmares for years. Not necessarily of violence, but I would have this dream where I had lost my weapon and was unarmed. I was in Iraq on the street or whatever and didn’t have a weapon. So yeah, there were some lingering effects, but I don’t complain about my personal experience in this.

The US killed a million people in Iraq. Maybe. The estimates vary, but hundreds of thousands, possibly a million people. They’re the ones who are the victims of this, not US soldiers like me who have hurt feelings when we come back. I want to be clear about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it sounds like your experience there affected your view of the broader mission for sure.

SETH HARP: Yes, profoundly, I would say.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about the guys you served with?

SETH HARP: My reaction was typical. Like I was saying before, there was a divide in the unit. I can remember debating the 2004 election with the guys who were for Kerry and the guys who were for Bush. The military is very reflective of our society. Maybe not the Special Forces, but the regular army is. And so the same divisions we see in society at large are reflected in the ranks. So it was no different.

Special Operations and Mission Perspective

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the prevailing view, let me ask you again, among the special operators is of the mission itself, like, why are we doing this? Is that a question they discuss?

SETH HARP: I don’t hear them talk about that sort of thing very much. Yeah, they just say, “bad guys, we kill bad guys, we kill terrorists.” I have to assume that in units like Delta Force, the majority of the guys are able to compartmentalize the ethics of it and say, or the wisdom of it and say that that’s simply not their job to think about and that they just follow orders.

But as you can see, in the case of a guy like Billy Levine, that only lasts for so long. Eventually it starts to dawn on you that this is not okay. And if you listen to operator type podcasts, you’ll hear a lot of that. They’re not the most jingoistic and pro war people. Like you said before, cable news anchors, not soldiers. The soldiers, I think, have a more nuanced perspective almost as a rule.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you ever run into any cable news anchors when you were over there?

SETH HARP: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Mark Levin was not in your unit?

SETH HARP: I didn’t see him, no. I did see Joe Millionaire once.

TUCKER CARLSON: Joe Millionaire? Whatever happened to him?

SETH HARP: I don’t know. I saw him in Iraq. I also saw 50 Cent gave a concert in Iraq.

TUCKER CARLSON: How was it?

SETH HARP: It was cool. Yeah. It was a high point of the deployment.

Drug Trafficking at Fort Bragg

TUCKER CARLSON: I want to go back to the connection between Levine and his friends, his colleagues, the Delta operators, but also the other special forces community members at Fort Bragg and drug use and drug trafficking. That’s shocking, but it doesn’t seem to have shocked their superiors. To what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military? I can’t believe I’m asking this question, but it sounds like it is.

SETH HARP: It’s hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question. And yet, from what I was able to learn, it’s not an isolated case. In fact, it seems that after 2020, the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fort Bragg only increased. And you even had public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging that they had 100% increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021.

TUCKER CARLSON: How could you have drug crime on a military base?

SETH HARP: It was very surprising to me as well. But you even have cases of military police officers dealing drugs out of their police cars on Fort Bragg. Folks want to look that up. Look up the case of Jacob Dickerson, who was an MP on Fort Bragg who was busted for drug trafficking.

In fact, I obtained the investigative files in that case and learned that there was actually four or five of these MPs on base that were trafficking drugs. And they dropped charges against all but one of the guys because he had exacerbated the trouble he was in by getting into a drunk driving accident. And even he was just given a slap on the wrist. I think he got a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge.

But there is a pervasive practice of, or there’s drug availability on Fort Bragg that’s comparable to any dense urban city in the United States.

Military Command Structure and Oversight

TUCKER CARLSON: The military is an authoritarian structure. I don’t need to tell you that since you served in it. So it seems like you could prevent that if you really wanted to. You could fix that problem.

SETH HARP: You would think so. And I’m at a loss to explain why so little has been done. I’ve talked to people who, CID sources who told me – CID is the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. It’s a quasi military, quasi civilian police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers.

So you have MPs, who are the uniformed officers, and then above them you have CID. So they’re the ones who investigate major crimes on bases. And they told me about closed door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass mostly seemed concerned with massaging the statistics that they kept just to make it seem like drug crime was under control when in fact it’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who runs Fort Bragg?

SETH HARP: Well, Fort Bragg is under the largest umbrella formation there would be the 18th Airborne Corps. So the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps is going to be the highest ranking army officer on Fort Bragg, but you also have the Joint Special Operations Command there, which is a very elite formation in the military. The most elite.

And so the commander of JSOC is also a very important and powerful person who’s a three star general, if I’m not mistaken, who’s on the base as well. So you have a collection of what people call the brass. And then of course they’re subservient to the Pentagon and the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense.

The Connection Between War and Drug Epidemics

TUCKER CARLSON: One connection that I’ve almost never heard anybody make, but I’ve thought about. So the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and extends all the way really to the final end in April of 1975 that coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United States.

Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy growing region, the golden triangle. And for a bunch of different reasons, that war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States. Like, and a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War. And I think there must be a connection.

You see the exact same phenomenon around the war in Afghanistan starts in 2001, ends three years ago. And it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that. Is there a direct connection between those two things?

SETH HARP: Yes, there is. And the US media’s failure to connect those things is probably the biggest dereliction of duty on part of the press corps that I’ve seen in my life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Those are big things.

SETH HARP: Big things, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: The death toll from drugs during the Vietnam period and particularly during the Afghanistan period, dwarfs the death toll in the war itself.

SETH HARP: Yeah. The number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose. And where does that come from? That comes directly out of the heroin crisis that afflicted this country from let’s say, the mid-2000s up until 2015, 16, 17, 18. And so it’s very important to ask what were the causes of the heroin crisis?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone ask that question.

SETH HARP: Well, the conventional explanation, which is not wrong, is that the roots of it lie in the over prescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s. Yes, that’s very true.

TUCKER CARLSON: That happened the Sackler family that created.

SETH HARP: Widespread dependence on opiates among a large number of people. You also saw at the same time, to feed this demand, increased heroin production in Mexico. However, more than 90% of all the world’s heroin was produced in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, more than 90%.

In fact, Afghanistan under US occupation produced more heroin than the world, the whole world, could absorb. So supply there outstripped global demand. And so for that reason, there are now believed to be large stockpiles of Afghan heroin in places like Pakistan and Tashkent.

TUCKER CARLSON: How could – wait, do you think heroin production went up under US occupation?

Afghanistan: From CIA Operations to Taliban Suppression

SETH HARP: I mean, it went up exponentially. And as a direct result of the US invasion. And we should talk about the Taliban in this context because I’ll try to keep it to the essentials, because it actually goes back to the 1980s.

So in the 1980s, the CIA armed and funded Afghan resistance fighters known as Mujahideen to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan and were occupying Afghanistan to prop up a communist government there. And they won that war. That’s what we call Charlie Wilson’s war, the movie, of course.

But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s. And they were all major drug traffickers. They’re the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco state that it became.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient of CIA cash and he turned into by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. There’s also the clan of Nassim Akhunzada in the Helmand province was another major recipient of CIA aid and who turned the Helmand into the world’s most prolific opium, poppy, heroin, morphine producing area in the world.

The Taliban – we hear so much about the Taliban’s oppression of women and making music illegal and they do those things. The Taliban is an arch conservative movement whose ethics and morality I absolutely do not share.

TUCKER CARLSON: However, I never understood why I was supposed to give a shit about that. I mean, I want everyone to be free just as a matter of principle, but that didn’t – but moving metric tons of heroin into my country, that seems like a real story. Whether people can, girls can get PhDs in feminist studies or whatever is of less concern to me.

SETH HARP: Right, right. Well, the Afghan people didn’t like it either. All the drug trafficking that was going on in their country and what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in Afghanistan. They eliminated, they took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there because it’s, you can see how it’s ideologically consistent with their Sharia law. They don’t tolerate drugs. They don’t tolerate alcohol either. So they get rid of all.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sharia law is bad, Seth. I don’t know if you’ve heard that it’s bad. It’s worse than what’s happening in New York and Detroit. It’s just bad. I don’t know why. It’s just like years of brainwashing. I just like, I’m not Muslim. I’m not for Sharia law. On the other hand, compared to what? Compared to Baltimore, you know, shut up. Sharia law.

SETH HARP: Well, in Afghanistan, the effect of implementing Sharia law was the complete suppression of the heroin industry and the decimation of the world’s supply.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of heroin and a massive reduction in the rape of boys. They didn’t like that.

SETH HARP: That’s another subject that’s absolutely part of this. And I almost hesitate to go there because it’s appalling. Everything I’m saying about drugs could also be talked about. I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but child sex trafficking was something that took place. That was something that the US backed client state was deeply implicated in.

Child sex trafficking – another thing that’s falsely laid at the feet of the Taliban and said, “this is just part of Afghan culture,” when that is not true. But to return to the heroin thing, it was actually in the summer of…

The Afghanistan Drug Trade Revelation

TUCKER CARLSON: 2001, your mind explodes when you start to understand what the truth is. Just that the layers of propaganda that attach like barnacles to your brain, when they come off, you’re like, I don’t even recognize this world. Do you feel that ever?

SETH HARP: In this case, yes. Because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I’d actually never been to Afghanistan. So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war starting from scratch.

And what I learned was that the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the US invaded. The DEA and the UN certified the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out.

When the US invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance. And those people took over, and Hamid Karzai was installed as CIA puppet president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan.

Within the span of, let’s say, two years, maybe three years, heroin production increased something like 7,000 to 8,000% in Afghanistan.

TUCKER CARLSON: And of course, a lot of it winds up in Europe and the United States, correct?

SETH HARP: Yes. You know, you have more heroin than the world can even absorb.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would the US authorities, why would the CIA, why would the White House allow that?

SETH HARP: My view, there’s a paranoid point of view, conspiratorial point of view among people who believe that this is some kind of societal program, there’s some nefarious program that the US government wants the whole world to be inundated with heroin.

I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don’t care and that these type of mercenary drug traffickers make natural allies to a foreign power that’s invading your country.

Negligence vs. Malice

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there a difference between negligence and malice? If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble at a casino, and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him or if I just didn’t care enough?

SETH HARP: No, I don’t think it matters.

TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t matter.

SETH HARP: And I’m not making an excuse.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, I know you’re not. I’m just saying the bottom line is that US authorities, the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, and then up until the end, up until the Biden administration allowed the United States and its citizens to die of drug overdoses. Because the country that they were running, Afghanistan, was producing all the heroin. Right?

The Cover-Up

SETH HARP: The amount of heroin that was being produced was very potent, high quality and large amounts of it. So that obviously supply and demand depressed prices. And you have ample reporting. It’s not just Europe and Australia and Asia that’s being flooded by heroin. Also the United States in this time saw a massive increase in supply.

Now here’s where the cover-up comes in. Because all of this was well reported up until the late 2000s, let’s say 2007 or so. That’s when the DEA started putting out statements to the effect that no, although there was rise in heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan. Less than 1% was the official figure.

And so in the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to figure out how exactly the DEA made this determination. Because it’s kind of saying no oil from Saudi Arabia ever gets burned in the United States. You ask how is that possible? That the world’s largest consumer of drugs is not importing any drugs from the world’s largest producer of drugs?

TUCKER CARLSON: Which, by the way, it controls.

SETH HARP: Which it controls. Yeah. That seems to defy reason.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, it does. That’s why you’re a good reporter, Seth.

SETH HARP: If you read the book, you will see that I get deep in the nitty gritty of it, down to the actual mathematics of it. But suffice it to say, I find that that statistic was totally bogus and invented as a way to cover up the fact this incredibly damaging effect of the war in Afghanistan had on US society.

China White vs. Black Tar

TUCKER CARLSON: So I guess another way to say that would be, in fact a lot of heroin from our client state Afghanistan was winding up in American cities.

SETH HARP: Absolutely. And especially the China White heroin. It’s called China because of its color, not because it actually comes from China. Now the picture is slightly confounded because there was also a lot of Mexican heroin coming to the United States during the same time. But Mexican heroin is black in color and low in quality. It’s called black tar heroin.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. It’s actually smoked.

SETH HARP: Right. But it was the China White that really flooded the US during this time period and caused the most damage, especially in the Northeast and in Appalachia and in the Midwest, because that’s where flights from Afghanistan come. It’s all traffic through airports on the eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico supplies the west of the United States and the South.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. That’s why Jerry Garcia was a black tar addict in Marin County, California. And all the junkies in Philadelphia are using China White.

SETH HARP: Right, right. And the China White, because it’s so much more potent, is what leads to all of the huge overdose crisis that we suffered during these years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Pretty hard to overdose from smoking heroin.

SETH HARP: Possible, but that’s my understanding. Yeah.

Who Profited?

TUCKER CARLSON: So who profited from that?

SETH HARP: That’s a very good question. Not the people of Afghanistan. The numbers that I’ve seen suggest that maybe a billion dollars a year was the profits that went to Afghans of one type or another. The majority of it went to drug supply chains outside of Afghanistan. And that’s the most opaque aspect of all of this. And that’s where I have the most unanswered questions. Who exactly was making all of this money?

TUCKER CARLSON: So the occupation of Afghanistan was a military occupation, diplomatic as well, intel components. But basically we had our troops in Afghanistan, therefore we controlled Afghanistan. So if there’s an exponential rise by thousands of percent in opium production, heroin manufacturing and export of heroin, it’s kind of hard to believe the US military didn’t know that.

Government Acknowledgment

SETH HARP: Oh, they certainly knew about it. And there’s an agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction that had, although it’s a US government agency, has done the most important retrospective work on this, including lots of interviews with key people. And all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on.

SIGAR discussed how the US military didn’t want anything to do with drug eradication because they saw it as detrimental to their mission because the people they were working with were drug traffickers.

And the same story goes for the CIA, except SIGAR explicitly says in its 2018 report on counter narcotics that the CIA, rather than cooperating with anti-drug eradication measures, prioritized its relationship with significant drug traffickers. That’s the language of the US government report, and it even names some major drug traffickers who worked with the CIA, who were on the CIA’s payroll.

And let’s not forget that the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, were on the payroll of the CIA and led this drug trafficking organization. Recently our government accused Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela of being the head of a drug cartel on some very flimsy evidence. And they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top.

If you had taken that same lens and trained it on Afghanistan, you could have very easily created an organization structure showing the world’s biggest drug cartel with Hamid Karzai at the very top. And he’s someone who is sitting down to dine with President Obama and all these other top US officials.

Military Personnel Involvement

TUCKER CARLSON: But if I’m a special operator in Afghanistan and I’m working with the local leaders who are also drug traffickers, I mean, it’s not a huge step. And I’m buying heroin for $1,000 a pound when I can resell it for many, many times that, it can be kind of tempting to bring some home. Right?

SETH HARP: Timothy Dumas, who was found dead next to Billy Lavine on Fort Bragg in 2020, had evidently written a letter in which he outlined exactly what you’re talking about. A drug trafficking organization involving Special Forces soldiers who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes. And he was killed before that letter was ever made public.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’d he write it to?

SETH HARP: He wrote it addressed to a top ranking general. I never read the letter, but I interviewed someone who did read the letter. I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas’s son and also his partner in crime, a very corrupt former North Carolina state trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it.

He said that it was addressed to a high ranking general. As I said before, Dumas intended to use this blackmail letter to exert pressure on the Special Forces in order to get his pension reinstated. But it doesn’t seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no. You can push too hard, then you wind up executed. I’m coming around to your theory, by the way, that this may have been retaliatory.

SETH HARP: That’s not my theory. Although I get what you’re saying. But just to be super clear about it, because these are not light allegations. So I just want to be as responsible as possible as a reporter, and say that this is what people have alleged, this is what the evidence is. But we don’t know for sure. And the reason we don’t know is because our ignorance has been procured by the people, by the authorities who have the responsibility to investigate this stuff and are not doing it.

Weapons Trafficking

TUCKER CARLSON: Nicely put, and thank you for saying that. Do you think US people in the US military in the Special Forces did participate in drug trafficking?

SETH HARP: I find it hard to imagine that they weren’t. I will say that there’s other ways of making money, other types of crime that I discuss in the book. The book’s not entirely about drug trafficking. There’s also a lot of weapons trafficking, a lot of weapons theft from the military.

Fort Bragg, it would blow your mind if they ever disclosed how much, how many weapons and how much in explosives that they lose annually. It’s really crazy.

TUCKER CARLSON: What kind of weapons? What kind of explosives?

SETH HARP: Military weapons and plastic explosives. They lose an incredible amount of weapons every year. And Timothy Dumas was a guy who was trafficking weapons besides trafficking drugs.

TUCKER CARLSON: Quartermaster.

SETH HARP: He was a quartermaster. And so he was deeply involved in all of this. Yeah, I mean, I read his separation packet. It’s 128 pages. And it makes crystal clear that his entire career was characterized by stuff going missing, documents going missing.

He was the, when he was in Afghanistan, attached to JSOC, all of the records for two years, 2012 and 2013, if I’m not mistaken, went missing in their entirety. All the paperwork on all of the JSOC supply chain for that battalion was just gone.

TUCKER CARLSON: But so what do you do with military grade weapons? Even small arms, fully automatic rifles. What do you do with something? You can’t sell it in the United States.

SETH HARP: You sell it to Mexican cartels and then that’s how they end up better armed than the Mexican government in states like Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon and Coahuila.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Ukrainian military has been selling NATO weapons, American supplied weapons to the Mexican drug cartels. Fact. They hate it when you say that, but it’s true.

Ukraine Aid and Accountability

SETH HARP: Well, I haven’t seen that reporting. But I will tell you this about Ukraine, that agency I mentioned earlier, SIGAR. There are provisions in the laws providing aid to Ukraine that ensure that that type of accountability never takes place again. Because SIGAR turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly. So the aid to Ukraine can never be audited. That’s written in the law.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, this can’t continue for too long. It’s too out of control.

SETH HARP: You know, the Roman Empire declined for hundreds of years before it finally disintegrated.

The Nature of Corruption in America

TUCKER CARLSON: So well, then it just moved east and it lasted another thousand years, but amazingly. So you’re absolutely right. But it is bewildering that this was even just 20 years ago, if you had done a poll of people I knew, anyway, I lived in D.C. I was around the government every day. Is this country corrupt? I would say not really. I mean, that was my view. I think most people felt that way. When you joined the army, did you think the people who ran the army were corrupt?

SETH HARP: No. The simple answer is no. But corruption takes many forms in the United States. If you get pulled over by a cop, you can’t just bribe that cop to let you know that’s not going to happen. But the higher you go up in the power structures in this country, the more you find legal corruption.

I mean, is it corruption for a corporation to give unlimited amounts of money to a politician to get elected? Because that’s what our Supreme Court says is totally legal under Citizens United. But in another context, in another country, in another time, that would just be considered the rankest sort of bribery. So it depends upon how you define corruption.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. It is bribery.

SETH HARP: I agree. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Well, obviously.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a complex question because, like, do you have a right to tell people to what extent they can support a politician? I don’t know. I mean, I think it is complicated, but the effect as it stands right now is politicians are bribed by donors.

SETH HARP: Yeah, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that’s how we got Ted Cruz. Totally corrupt human being.

SETH HARP: Yeah, he’s unfortunately my senator. I hope that he has a primary challenger soon.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, I think he just won, so probably not for a while. But anyway, sorry not to get off on a Ted Cruz tangent, but I just want to say again, Ted Cruz is corrupt. His wife works for Goldman in Texas, and when she pitches clients, I happen to know for a dead certain fact he goes to dinner with them. So that’s corruption.

SETH HARP: Well, I’m sure he’s looking forward to coming back on your show again for the last time.

Military Corruption and Moral Decay

TUCKER CARLSON: Anyway, sorry, now I’m being mean, but it’s true, and there’s a lot of it. But when it happens in the Senate, you’re like, okay, of course, Ted Cruz is corrupt. Look at him. But when it happens among people most civilians revere, like the most elite units in the US Military. That’s dispiriting, among other things, right?

SETH HARP: I think it is. And I think my inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in for years and years, because think about what that does to your psychology when you’re engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy in. You’re going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor.

And you’re going to know that when you’re tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that’s not consistent with your self image and so you don’t do it. But when you’re fighting for years in wars like Afghanistan that the public just doesn’t even pay attention to, and all your allies are drug traffickers and they’re raping little boys and that they’re trafficking sex slaves, but you’re just doing it because you like your work and you like being an elite soldier.

Then it’s easier to take a mercenary attitude towards this and just think, “It’s not going to matter if I skim $100,000 off the top of the op fund that we have out here in the field, all this cash that we’re given, or it’s no big deal for me to grab a couple bricks of this heroin and put it in my foot locker and then sell it for 50 grand when I get back to Fayetteville.”

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope what you just said is clipped because that’s a perfect summation of what my instincts are that the more morally corrupt the enterprise is, the more morally corrupt the people participating in the enterprise become.

SETH HARP: And that’s why I spend so much time in the book talking about the wars in which all of this, the context in which this takes place, because it doesn’t take place in a vacuum. And the decisions of our leaders in this country trickle down to the lowest levels and have an influence on how people live their lives.

The Afghanistan Drug Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right. Has anyone ever been held accountable? I mean, I think you’ve confirmed my instinct, which is that there was a connection between the war in this drug producing country and our occupation of this drug producing country and the drug epidemic in the United States. I mean, there’s clearly, I mean, you have to be an idiot not to see the connection. But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that?

SETH HARP: No. Nobody.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nobody.

SETH HARP: Nobody. No. For the drug trafficking that took place in Afghanistan?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SETH HARP: No, that’s never happened. And there’s been total impunity around the entire enterprise.

TUCKER CARLSON: Man. I think the United States government, I don’t think, I know, is doing things right now whose consequences cannot be foreseen, but they’ll be profound.

SETH HARP: I agree.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think the more rotten your behavior, the bigger the consequences. And you don’t get away with it. No one gets away with it.

Contemporary Corruption and Ukraine

SETH HARP: I agree. And you wonder what’s going on now, because Afghanistan is fading rapidly into the past. The war ended in 2021. And is there massive drug trafficking taking place under the auspices of US military control right now? Not that I know of. But there’s other things.

Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe before the war there, before Russia invaded. And we’ve dumped so much money and so much equipment into that country with no oversight at all, and transferred it to a political class that we know is corrupt to the bone. So that would be the place to look now, in my opinion, for contemporary examples of corruption.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’d get assassinated if you tried to do that. You’d be assassinated by the Ukrainians, perhaps with the help of US intel agencies, period.

SETH HARP: I feel like it would be very unsafe to look into that.

TUCKER CARLSON: It would be very unsafe. I can tell you firsthand. It would be very, very unsafe to do that. In fact, you couldn’t do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is pretty crazy if you think about it.

The Taliban’s Drug Eradication Success

SETH HARP: It is crazy. There’s a lot of things that are crazy these days. I think that what made it possible to write what I wrote about Afghanistan was something that happened while I was writing the book, not too long ago, in fact, which was that the Taliban took over after the US withdrew in 21, and then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000, 2001, which was to completely eradicate all drugs from the country.

And up until then, we had been told to the extent that drug production in Afghanistan came up, we were always told that it was the Taliban and that the insurgency and that drug production were just two sides of the same coin.

TUCKER CARLSON: Liars.

SETH HARP: Yes, but the best lies are the ones that are 180° opposite of the truth.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly, exactly.

SETH HARP: And what made it, what gave me the confidence to really hit as hard as I could in this narrative was seeing the Taliban in 2023. They completed another eradication campaign where they once again totally eliminated heroin production and drug production from Afghanistan.

So at that point, I had doubts as a reporter because I’m not omniscient and there’s all these conflicting information. So I kind of doubt my own conclusions. I’m thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree. You hear that said so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government. There must be some truth to it.

But seeing the Taliban totally eliminate drugs from their country again made me realize okay. This was always a one sided thing. It wasn’t that both sides were involved in it. And like I said, that didn’t happen until 2023. And so, and that’s what I think makes it possible to tell the true story of Afghanistan for the first time.

Taliban Drug Treatment vs. American Methods

TUCKER CARLSON: You want to get really red pilled. You want to make it almost hard to live here. Look up Taliban drug treatment. You know, you’re in your early 40s, I think, so you’ve lived in this country a long time and you must know people who’ve been ensnared in drugs or died from drugs. I know. And you must, you live here. So you know.

SETH HARP: Sure, yeah, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m addicted to drugs and can’t get off. And a lot of them, most are dead. Ask yourself, super simple question, is the Taliban drug treatment program? You can look this up, there are videos of it online.

SETH HARP: Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does it have, does it produce a higher or lower relapse rate than the American version in say, Delray Beach, Florida? Are the Taliban better at getting people off opioids than we are? And the answer is not just yes, but hell yes, way better. Because they don’t wean them off with methadone. This whole thing is a freaking lie, by the way. A lot of people get rich off that.

Some of them are big political donors who get rich on drug treatment programs. Disgusting. And doesn’t work. It works for some small percentage, but it doesn’t work for most, that’s for sure. And a lot of them die and they never lead productive, joyful lives.

And the Taliban have a faith based, I know I’m probably get pulled off YouTube for saying this, but it’s true. I’m saying this as a Christian, not a Muslim. They have a faith based, no nonsense, zero intoxicant policy in their rehab. And it works and ours doesn’t.

SETH HARP: Well, it’s a really good point because…

TUCKER CARLSON: Afghanistan, you think drugs are a serious problem and I do because I’ve lived it and seen it. Yeah, it’s a serious point. It’s a serious point that we should think about. Yeah, what is that?

SETH HARP: Well, Afghanistan came to have the highest rates of drug use in the world, the highest addiction rate in the world, which is a tragedy and something that was foisted on them. And it’s a source of profound misery and blight.

And the Taliban’s way of dealing with it once the US Left was to simply round up addicts, if they found them on the street, they would just put them onto buses and it was involuntary take them to these detox wards where they’re not given any kind of methadone.

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct.

SETH HARP: Medication. They’re just given food, water and a place to stay. And then they just wait it out. They’re basically locked in there and they suffer through withdrawals. And then once they’re sober, they’re allowed to leave at that point.

And it was amazing to me to see the hostility in the Western reaction to the drug, to the Taliban’s drug detox program. I mean, you can read all these think tank pieces, all these NGOs, where they’re talking about how inhumane this is.

The Value of Difficult Withdrawal

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’ve been through withdrawal from alcohol and it was so unpleasant, and I did it alone. I’m not, I didn’t have, not done anything extraordinary. But the one extraordinary thing I did go through that, man, I never drank it. You go through that. I mean, I know people relapse after going through withdrawals for sure, but I can just speak for myself and other people I know have done it. That’s a pretty powerful incentive not to do it again.

It is. And I do think there’s a cost to sort of easing people out or something. I mean, some withdrawal is life threatening. Of course you don’t want to kill people. But opiate withdrawal is not life threatening. It’s just you just shit yourself a lot and feel terrible. I don’t know. There is, I could speak from experience. There’s value in that. Like you’ll never have another glass of vodka if you’ve gone through something like that. That’s, that was my feeling.

SETH HARP: So let me ask you, would you like to see police officers tomorrow?

The Reality of America’s Drug Crisis

TUCKER CARLSON: Tomorrow, if you’re standing leaning against a trash can in the fentanyl haze, if you’re tweaking your brains out and picking open wounds on your face from meth, that is it. You are in hell. You’re dying. You’re a fellow American. I have an obligation to help you.

You’re beyond helping yourself in the way that a child, a toddler, is beyond helping himself in the way that a schizophrenic is beyond helping himself. You don’t have reason. You don’t have free will. And it’s incumbent on me to love you through action.

And we can argue about the details of treatment. I personally think that when possible and not physically dangerous, total withdrawal is the best way, having done it. But I also think more bigger than that is you can’t allow this and call yourself a decent society. You cannot allow this. This is hell.

And anyone who doesn’t think it’s hell doesn’t know anything about it. What if that was your daughter getting pimped out? It’s that ugly and you’re from a city where it’s just totally destroyed your downtown. But most American cities can say that. And no one does anything.

So, yeah, tomorrow. This is a country where we force people to take the COVID vaccine. So don’t lecture me about civil liberties. I do feel that way. Strongly. And how many addicts do I know personally who got sober in jail?

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re grateful for that. And so when Nancy Pelosi starts talking about compassion. The partial birth abortion lady’s talking to me about compassion. Compassion. Look at your city. There’s no compassion there. That’s hate. Hate for your fellow citizens allowing this stuff.

Drugs are destroying America. I said as a former user of drugs and was very liberal on drugs, but I was wrong.

SETH HARP: I should say I’m not a drug warrior. I don’t believe in the war on drugs. I don’t think drugs should be illegal. I think that they should be regulated rather than controlled as a controlled substance that’s totally illegal.

But I’m inclined to your point of view about the rehabilitation of large numbers of drug users. I think that drugs are one of the most salient features of American society for the worse. And that we have a, just as a country, we have a big drug problem. And you see that affecting the military more than ever.

TUCKER CARLSON: I guess I shouldn’t be. Well, of course, you’re absolutely right. It’s so hard to readjust your previous perceptions of things. But you’re right, of course. I should not be shocked that there’s a drug problem in the military. There’s a drug problem everywhere else. There’s a drug problem in suburbia. There’s a drug problem in the inner city. There’s a drug problem in rural America. We just have drug problems in America. Bottom line.

Treatment vs. Incarceration

SETH HARP: Let me say this in response to what you’re saying about rounding people up and putting them into detox wards. I think that’s better than arresting them and putting them in prison for using drugs.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course.

SETH HARP: And probably cheaper too.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not even like, compared to what. How much aid have we sent to Israel to kill people in Gaza?

SETH HARP: Money’s not an issue.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, on some level it is an issue, but it’s also, it’s an expression of your priorities. What I spend money on in my family is an expression of what I care about.

SETH HARP: Well, what I mean is you care.

TUCKER CARLSON: About your own people and the kids who are literally standing there. How can you allow that? Or people lying in their own feces on the sidewalk. That’s so shameful. It’s a mark of shame against all of us. Those are Americans and I don’t think we should put them in jail. I completely agree with you. That’s not a crime as much as it’s a tragedy. It’s a crime against them. They’re committing a crime against themselves.

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t allow that. Would you allow your child, if you had a child who was addicted to fentanyl, standing like this, you’d be like, “I’m going to chain you to the radiator until you get better. I love you that much.”

SETH HARP: Wouldn’t you? Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, we should love our fellow citizens that much. But we hate them and we call it compassion. That’s hate. It’s not compassion. Nothing bothers me more than that.

SETH HARP: It is upsetting to see the degree of degradation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s the word.

SETH HARP: As a result of the drug industry.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re human beings.

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’ve been reduced to something less than human beings.

Root Causes of the Crisis

SETH HARP: Yes. And there’s a lot of factors that go into that. There’s a lot of causes and one of them is something we’re really not here to talk about today, but it’s the downward mobility that we see in our society, the lack of economic prospects that people have.

TUCKER CARLSON: I strongly agree.

SETH HARP: Especially if they don’t have an elite education.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

SETH HARP: The cost of housing. There’s a lot of reasons why people end up like zombies.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you could also. I mean. Yes, I say that often. I mean it sincerely. And a tiny number of the worst people are taking all the money. I totally agree with that. “Oh, you’re a socialist.” No, I’m not. I’m an American who remembers a middle class country and I would like to have that again. That’s it. Even though I’m not middle class.

But anyway, leaving that aside, you can say there are a lot of reasons your house is on fire. But the first response is to put it out. We probably should upgrade the electrical after this, or put a lightning rod on the roof or whatever. We can take steps to prevent it happening again. But right now you need hoses and water.

And if you see Americans dying of drugs on the street, you have to stop that immediately. Those are human beings with souls. They’re your countrymen.

The Misguided War on Cartels

SETH HARP: And I think that the government now under Trump, what they’re trying to do is declare war on Mexican drug cartels or on the Venezuelan government. And this, I think is totally misguided and will be ineffectual if they actually go through with it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Certainly the Venezuela thing is a product of.

SETH HARP: Yeah, the thing is we’re talking about the complicity of the US Government and the international drug trade.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you think that’s real?

SETH HARP: Oh, I definitely think that’s real. And it’s, again, it’s not what I was saying before. It’s not a top down conspiracy where it’s actually the purpose. It’s a side effect of our imperialism and the permanent war paradigm.

And in Mexico, I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico before I was working on this book as a reporter, reporting on the drug wars there. The cartel war is there. And it’s one thing, Trump can tell people, he can tell his voters, “We’re going to declare war on Mexican drug cartels.” And people will buy into that because they see them as vicious criminals and murderers who are pumping drugs into this country. So it’s easy to see why they would be for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I feel that way. I see them that way.

The Truth About Mexican Drug Cartels

SETH HARP: Well, the reality is that Mexican drug cartels don’t really exist in the same way that we’ve been taught to believe in them by Netflix and Hollywood. In fact, there’s a recent book, it’s an academic book, it’s not the easiest to read, but I think it has an important thesis. It’s by a Mexican academic named Oswaldo Zavala and it’s called “Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.”

What he means by that provocative thesis is that there are not the type of organizations that we see represented in shows like Narcos. Take El Chapo Guzman, for example, the famous drug lord who was captured, I guess, 2015, 2016. The US government to date has seized no assets belonging to him. None. Why is that? I thought he was one of the world’s richest men. He’s on Forbes list was one of the world’s richest men.

TUCKER CARLSON: No assets?

SETH HARP: None. Zero.

TUCKER CARLSON: You reserved that only for Russian oligarchs.

SETH HARP: Well, I don’t think they can find any. They can’t find any because the drug industry in Mexico is incredibly complex. The first thing to understand is that it’s not a collection of organizations, it’s a market. And the demand component of that market is in the United States. So people in this country wanting drugs is the battery that’s running this whole thing. Because once there’s that demand, suppliers inevitably arise to feed it.

And in Mexico, those suppliers, yes, there are low level traffickers. There are the people, the disposable people, who are bringing the drugs across the border, the disposable hitmen who are 14 years old and carrying out hits. But the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the military and the police, politicians, lawyers, deep pocketed investors. They’re the ones that are going in on drug trafficking ventures, essentially as joint ventures, as investments.

It’s much more organic and spontaneous than we’re led to believe. The organization, to the extent that it exists, can be found in high level army generals or high level police officers who are taking a cut from all the little fish who are swimming through certain drug trafficking routes. So the sort of idea that we have of a cartel where it’s just bad guys hiding out in their lair, having meetings with the bosses, that just simply doesn’t exist in Mexico.

The El Chapo Myth

TUCKER CARLSON: So El Chapo, just to get back to the original example, was described as a billionaire. We got a pretty, what seemed like a pretty detailed accounting of the revenue. Well, no, we didn’t.

SETH HARP: I mean, you’re talking about the DEA and the DOJ. I mean these, they are capable of manufacturing narratives. They’re lawyers, they are prosecutors. They can put this stuff together and make this case. Look, I’m not saying that El Chapo wasn’t a drug trafficker. He was, but he consistently claimed that he was a small fry. And he had like four guys with him at the time that he was arrested.

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought he had like a private zoo with white lions.

SETH HARP: And where is that? I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen his pictures of his mom’s house in Sinaloa. But there was that time that Sean Penn went to go visit him. Did that look like the lair of a drug trafficker? He looked like an ignorant campesino up there. He had like chickens in cages and stuff. And he was clearly a very naive person when Sean Penn interviewed him. He wanted. He was entrapped into this by a desire to give flowers to Kate Del Castillo, the Mexican actress who was with Sean Penn. I digress to some degree.

TUCKER CARLSON: The point is, the bottom line is they’ve. I just want you to say it again. They’ve. The US Government, nor the Mexican government’s never confiscated any of this wealth.

SETH HARP: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That we were told he had.

SETH HARP: That’s right. Because the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the political class. That’s like this with the United States security state. That is funded. That gets all of their, the Mexican army. Things have changed in Mexico, by the way, this is a moving target to discuss because Mexico is, starting in 2018, has gone through profound political changes.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.

SETH HARP: That’ll be the beginning of AMLO.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure of the AMLO period.

SETH HARP: Yeah, AMLO and then his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. But at the bottom, especially in the northern states of Mexico along the Texas border.

TUCKER CARLSON: Border, Yep.

SETH HARP: I don’t think so much has changed there. And if you look, just take a state like Tamaulipas, which is just south of Texas, which has probably the highest intensity of drug trafficking anywhere in the world, bringing it to the United States. Who are the real powers there? I mean, you could say it’s the Gulf Cartel or you could say it’s Los Zetas. These are the organizations that we’ve been trained by the media to believe are the sort of puppet masters that are making all this happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, I bought that storyline. Totally.

SETH HARP: Okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I have no other information. I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t know. But I mean, I’ve just sort of assumed that was true.

SETH HARP: The real drug traffickers there, the real power. The idea that we often also hear that the Mexican state is outgunned by drug traffickers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I bought that too.

The Reality of Mexican Cartels and U.S. Government Complicity

SETH HARP: I made a comment about that earlier about how the high power weapons that they have, there’s some element of truth to that. But the reality is that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state. In fact, they’re an appendage of the Mexican state in a certain way.

And the elite class in Mexico, they’re kind of a shadow paramilitary structure of, let’s say a state government like the state government of Tamaulipas and the police forces there and the military divisions that are stationed there. And we’re not going to go to war with those people because there are allies.

I mean, people may not realize this, but there’s close security cooperation between the US and Mexico. The Mexican army, we arm them, we give them their Black Hawk helicopters and their armored vehicles and also the state police forces in the north of Mexico, we arm all of them and they get training from the State Department and from American police officers and so on. And they’re the real cartel to the extent a cartel exists.

And you can see that in other places in the world, notably in Colombia, where again, it’s changing there because they also have a new president. Latin America is changing rapidly in recent years. But in the past, for many years in Colombia, the Colombian federal government and the Colombian military have been the biggest drug most responsible for moving the most weight in drugs, I would say. And once again, they’re closely backed by the US government.

So to bring it home and wrap up this point, you can say we’re going to target drug cartels in Mexico. But the fact is one, they have no idea who these people are, the people that they’re setting up as drug traffickers. They may have developed some targets. To fight a war you need not only political will, you need targets. That was a problem, incidentally, parenthetically in Afghanistan. It was hard for them to develop targets there because it’s such a big remote country.

Anyway, in Mexico they’re not going to be able to find those targets. And to the extent that they are, they’re going to be people that are protected by the State Department and the CIA. And so it’s just not going to happen. This is this drug war, this war on Mexican drug cartels. I don’t see it happening. And if it does, it’ll be in the nature of very isolated strikes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what is the answer?

SETH HARP: You have to address the demand. The demand is what’s causing all this.

The Case for Sobriety as National Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: So long as why can’t anyone just. Why? Here’s what I don’t understand. Sobriety is good. Okay? Sobriety is the key to joy and productivity and like having a useful life, making it worth being here.

SETH HARP: I agree.

TUCKER CARLSON: Short period that we are. I believe that through much experience, I’ve never heard any leader in our country say that.

SETH HARP: What I’m saying about Mexico?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, about sobriety, about sobriety. The goal ought to be clear thinking, you know, whatever, within the bounds of human nature. But like virtuous life. I don’t know, try to be clear eyed, hard working, decent and sober. Like, I don’t. No one. Like there’s no kind of goal set by our leaders. Like, maybe you shouldn’t be wasted all the time. Maybe you should get off your freaking SSRIs, which make you impotent, by the way, you know, or your benzodiazepines or your beer or your weed. Like, no one even says that.

SETH HARP: I mean, I think they’re all on drugs.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everyone’s on drugs.

SETH HARP: I think the whole US Government’s on drugs.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

Drug Use in the White House

SETH HARP: I mean, look at the people at the highest level. I mean, don’t want to cast just reckless aspersions, but here’s something that’s concrete. Rolling Stone, a magazine I’ve written for for many years, reported on drug use in Trump’s first White House. And in fact, Trump’s personal doctor, Ronnie “the Candyman” Jackson they called him. He was an admiral, if I’m not mistaken, in the Navy.

A physician who was demoted by the Navy for running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House because he was giving Trump’s people prescription drugs without a prescription and for free. And even if you’re the President’s personal physician, that’s illegal. So there’s evidence that all of those people were. And you see it in their behavior as well.

And I’m not just picking on the Republicans here because look at Kamala Harris, for example. I don’t know her personally and I can’t say for sure, but did she seem like someone who was, you know, taking a lot of prescription pills?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I worked for someone like that in television. It was the head of a network who, I mean, we used to joke, this person’s on benzos, like just dead eyed. I mean, you see that so much.

SETH HARP: Talking nonsensically, like weird, you know, laughing, weird reactions. People who just are not quite there in a certain way and it seemed kind of zonked out in a certain way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s the whole country that seems.

SETH HARP: Like a lot of our top leaders.

TUCKER CARLSON: So my question is, why does no one ever mention that and just say, like, here’s what the goal, you know, we all fall short of the goal. It’s not even judging. I’m not judging anybody. I’m not qualified to judge anybody. But like, I do think it’s important to articulate the goal. And why shouldn’t someone say the goal is sobriety?

SETH HARP: You know, again, I’m not here to be a drug warrior or paternalistic or to lecture people who struggle with substance abuse. But I certainly agree with you that we should, that that should be evaluated.

Legal Codes and Universal Values

TUCKER CARLSON: You should know, Seth, that the real danger is Sharia law. Sharia law. And you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. Like, oh, man, I hope we don’t ever wind up with a society like this with a rape rate of 0, where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don’t ever worry about it being stolen. And, you know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home. You know what I mean?

SETH HARP: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, I hope we don’t wind up with that.

SETH HARP: Yeah, I think that. I mean, Sharia law is obviously just a punchline. I don’t know that too many people actually believe in the reality of that. And I mean, sure, like I said, you know, I’m a lawyer. I actually studied legal philosophy. Sharia is not that different from other legal codes. A lot of our own legal code, the Anglo Saxon common law, Anglo American common law, derives ultimately from religious authorities.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hope so.

SETH HARP: There’s a lot of universal. There’s a lot of universal values in.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hammurabi’s code is recognizable. I wouldn’t want to live under it. It’s kind of punitive. But it’s not like from another planet. The oldest legal code that we have, Hammurabi’s code, it’s like. It’s not like you sort of know what he’s talking about. Right.

SETH HARP: Look, they. I agree. Yeah. And look, they put up 10 Commandments in front of the. I live in Austin, Texas, and they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the state Capitol. And that’s controversial among, you know, religious libertarians. But I’m of the view that they. I’m happy to see them put the Ten Commandments up there if they would just follow them, you know, starting with “thou shalt not kill.”

Pentagon’s Response to Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. So let me just put a bow on this really super interesting conversation.

SETH HARP: Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: With the question, like, how were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this or more with the author, with, like, DoD, for example, with the Pentagon. Like, you must have called over there to the PIOs and said, you know, I have the list of following questions. How did they respond to you?

SETH HARP: In general? They just didn’t respond. And I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico is publishing an excerpt of the book, and so we had to go back to them again for comment. And the fact that it involves Delta Force, the fact that it involves a special mission unit, you know, they said that explicitly in the response that I got from USASOC yesterday. They said, “because your question implicates a special mission unit, you know, our policy is to not comment.” So for the most part, they didn’t give me anything. I was on my own.

TUCKER CARLSON: But so here you have a documented case of one of their guys murdering someone in his house. Obviously, there was drug trafficking, there was indisputably drug use, narcotic use by federal employees. And they don’t have to answer any of your questions because the missions are shrouded in secrecy.

SETH HARP: Yes, that’s right. In general. That’s right. I will say, you know, I try not to be. I try to be fair when possible or to give credit where credit is due. There was a case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the commander, SOCOM, which is an umbrella formation above JSOC and above all these units, questioned him in a committee, a Senate committee, about my reporting for Rolling Stone, and asked him to address, you know, the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders.

And General Brian Fenton, who at the time was the commander of SOCOM, said that he was concerned about it, said that it was unacceptable, said that they were laser focused on eradicating it. But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Prospects for Military Reform

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you see the possibility of reform?

SETH HARP: You know, I don’t think that I’m very critical of, in this book of every single presidential administration since 2001. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. None of them I give a pass to any of them. But I do see Trump’s influence here to be uniquely negative because of the way that he surrounds himself with some of the craziest people in the special operations community, elevates these people who are. Who among their own colleagues are considered loose cannons, not credible.

You know, there’s the case of Eddie Gallagher, where Trump made it such a big part of his brand to defend this disgrace to the Navy SEALs who was turned in by his own teammates for killing a bunch of people for no reason. I mean, you’re talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination. They’re there with Chief Gallagher next to him, seeing what he’s doing, and they’re not okay with it. They turn him in.

The command wants nothing to do with Gallagher. They also think that he’s an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer. But Trump intervenes to prevent him from losing his trident and Trump touts him and he becomes this big influencer and so forth. So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump’s part, his uniquely malignant influence as commander in chief, I think augurs very poorly for the possibility of reform in, at least in the next three years.

The Decline of American Military Power

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you want honest, competent, decent military because, you know, it’s the purest expression of power that a government has the power to kill people. And you have to think that they’re operating on a different and elevated moral plane. They can’t just be like an outlaw state. You know what I mean?

SETH HARP: Yes. That’s what I was saying before about the founding of the U.S. Army 250 years ago. It is a core institution for our country, for our nation. So to see the degree of decline, it’s everywhere, you know, possible to observe, it’s very concerning.

And I really don’t think people are aware of the degree to which the military is incapable of fulfilling its functions. I don’t know that you can say that the US has the most powerful military in the world anymore. I think that you. A strong case could be made that China has a more competent military, even though they’ve. They have never been in combat. They have, like, totally untested. So there’s a big caveat there.

But just looking on the surface, like, I don’t think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other. I don’t think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left. And also, China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that’s really shocking.

I mean, they’re really running out of people. This year, recruiting was a little bit better, but you’re still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting. The army’s never been smaller than it is right now. They can’t get qualified helicopter pilots, let’s say, as we saw so you know, tragically demonstrated over the Potomac river in January.

So I think that, you know, beyond just the drugs, there’s a lot of reasons to be concerned, you know, about the health and viability of the US Military in general.

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, that’s a sad story. Seth Harp, thank you very much for that.

SETH HARP: Thanks for having me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Appreciate it.

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